The County's First Murder Indictment: Eager and Kelley, 1858

1858 · FROM CHAPMAN'S "DARK DEEDS"

Chapman's 1880 county history opens its chapter of crimes — titled, in the manner of its century, "Dark Deeds" — with the sentence that frames Mishawaka's whole early record: "Thirty-eight years had passed from the time Pierre Navarre made here his home before the murderous hand was raised. The first case was that of Charles Eager." The chapter was read first-hand for this history, and its full table of cases run as a test for this ground: of the killings Chapman preserves — Wilson in Greene Township, Boucher at South Bend, Stage at South Bend, Schulkoski, Hickman at New Carlisle, Sullivan and Dice at South Bend — exactly one was a Mishawaka offense. The county's murder record opens here.

Charles Eager was indicted on October 7, 1858, for the murder of Charles Kelley, at Mishawaka — the place stated in the indictment's own summary as Chapman prints it. Kelley and several companions from South Bend went to Mishawaka, and while intoxicated got into a difficulty, in the course of which Kelley was stabbed in the heart by Eager. On trial, Chapman records, "the evidence seemed conclusive that the murder was done in self-defense, and the accused was acquitted"; W. G. George and John F. Miller appeared for the defense. The charge and the verdict are kept distinct here as the record keeps them: the county's first murder indictment ended in an acquittal on self-defense. The record follows Eager one step further, out of the county: the same defendant was afterward convicted of manslaughter in Allen County and sentenced to eight years in the penitentiary.

That is the whole of Mishawaka's nineteenth-century murder record in the county histories — one indictment, one acquittal, and a defendant's later conviction elsewhere. The balance of Chapman's chapter, and of Howard's 1907 history after him, belongs to other ground and is carried in those places' files. The thinness has a named limit: the decades after 1880 stand in the un-digitized newspaper backfiles and the circuit court's order books rather than in the histories, and one lead those histories do carry could not be placed at all — Howard's biography of the South Bend lawyer Courtland P.

Sources:

1. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), ch. XVI, "Dark Deeds," pp. 586–592 — read first-hand
2. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1 — the DuComb biography and its Koonsman reference; read first-hand